Keanu Reeves is again putting on his white shirt, doing up his black tie and blowing away approximately one hundred people in the third instalment of this career resurrection hitman romp. Keanu is surely due a successfully completed trilogy and this is, almost, the perfect summation of the series. You may consider it the pick of the bunch, or you may prefer one of the previous two chapters, but I can't imagine anybody beyond the odd, obligatory nutter, feeling let down by it.

The unique glory of the series is that it evolved before your very eyes. What took Fast and Furious the best part of a decade to do it did in hours. The first film started out like it was going to be just another piece of tired old revenge drama tosh, the kind of crap Steven Seagal might once have lumbered his way through for the beered-up derision of a late night Channel 5 audience. But almost immediately it started to get ideas and humour and its consciousness grew exponentially. By the second instalment, it had accumulated a mythology to itself, a unique identity revolving around the Continental Hotel, proprietor Ian McShane, a neutral territory where underworld types can rest up without fear of retribution. The third one just runs with it, and runs hard.

Chapter 3 hurtles out on to the screen: the first half hour contains three breathtaking fight sequences, each of which has their own distinct character, are wildly inventive, and laugh out loud funny. (They are also brutally violent. What is this, Game of Thrones?) You are wondering how they intend to keep this up for over two hours and the answer is they aren't. Shortly after they take a breather with a trip abroad. In truth, the film loses something when it leaves New York.

Mindless violence – inane brawling, guileless blade play, burkish machine gun spray – has very little to recommend it. But then mindful violence – the minutely choreographed savagery that is the hallmark of these films – probably doesn't have much merit either but to a degraded 21st century mentality it feels like grace and elegance. Keanu isn't a modern day Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire, but maybe director Stahelski is our Busby Berkely or Bob Fosse. A former stuntman, behind the camera he makes sure that movement is cherished. I'd say his work here was up there with Gareth Evans' work in The two Raid films. Especially when you take into consideration that his star isn't some great martial artist, but a slightly paunchy man in his early fifties.

(to be fair though, Keanu pretend fighting is very impressive.)

In an early scene in Time Square, Buster Keaton can be seen on one of the electronic billboards and the film is imbued with his spirit of deadpan slapstick. The fight sequences have the timing of the silent comedy gags, coupled with a sense of excess that makes them hilarious. And, though they are almost sickeningly violent, they are oddly benign. They retain an emotional distance. It's a work out for those on screen but nobody in the audience is invited to get worked up by the action. It is still technically a revenge thriller, but one with no interest in catharsis.

I said at the beginning that it was almost the perfect summation of the series, and that is because of the ending. So I won't tell you, obviously, but they come so close to rounding off the trilogy in style, to get out clean, and then they let it slip through their fingers.